In today's telecommunications, digital networks transport large amounts of information. Network services can be, for example, traditional voice phone, facsimile, television, audio and video broadcast, and data transfer.
With the increasing need of information exchange in the global society, the capacity of existing and future networks must be used efficiently. Multiplexers switch different network services to a single network in such a way that every service is fully maintained and does not disturb other services.
Communication integrated circuits use various techniques, such as time division multiplexing (TDM), to transmit information from multiple communication channels over a single communication line, as well as to receive information the is destined to many communication channels.
Exemplary communication integrated circuits and TDM methods are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 6,771,630 of Weitz et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,059 of Hagai et al., both being incorporated herein by reference. An exemplary TDM scheme is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,855,996 of Douskalis.
The multiple communication channels are organized in frames. Simple TDM frames are just duplicated over time. Thus, the content of a certain frame (the allocation of time slots within the frame) remains the same over long periods. Recently, there is a need to define multi-frames that are characterized by including repetitions of multiple different frames.
These multi-frames are usually transmitted or received over channels that require highly accurate time division multiplexing and synchronization.
There is a need to provide efficient methods for multi-frame management and to provide a device having multi-frame management capabilities.